


a forceful suspension of disbelief.

by skullduggery



Category: True Detective
Genre: Gen, existential ramblings, sort of really thats about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-15
Updated: 2014-12-15
Packaged: 2018-03-01 13:18:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2774429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skullduggery/pseuds/skullduggery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Augers and whispers, strange stones and thin pockets of paused time—they cannot exist outside your own head, so in your own head you must believe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a forceful suspension of disbelief.

You believe these things because you must. Because visible reality is a thin film of flesh stretched taut over all the maggots churning beneath you. Every breath you take wears your cells a little thinner, and you breathe,  
you inhale smoke and dust and muggy Louisiana air because you must.  
It’s not all in the vision, though that, you suppose, plays a part in it. Every paradox, every fragile tautology you hold dear, clings to empirical evidence as you cling, white-knuckled, to the earth’s surface.  
It’s not a matter of choice. It never was.  
When you pick through snarls of sycamore and hemlock, mud and sweat that buzzes down your spine, it’s an act of necessity that drives you. Your own sense of self-preservation has always been held as a point of contention, but you know there is a game trail nearby because you know there are beasts wiser in these ways than you watching through the trees. That prickle in the corner of your eye keeps you going when your feet can’t steady you because if the creatures in the dark have their ways, so, you too have a road to find.  
When reality burns through in tired filaments, wired crudely into the rest of the blank space, you must learn hard and swift to trust it. Augers and whispers, strange stones and thin pockets of paused time—they cannot exist outside your own head, so in your own head you must believe.  
Believe like it’s your last meal, too-salty chalk on your tongue. Believe like you have something to live for, because your reality? It believes in you.  
What you have is a tentative agreement, a series of pacts with the voices at the dark heart of everything that hold you together against all reason.  
 _If fate would just fuck off for a little while, you might be able to do some good for all the sorry sacks of self-aware contradictions and noise still under its pull._  
 _If you could just pause time, you could tinker, and you could—_  
make an even bigger mess out of the inevitable, so you don’t. 

Breathe, blink, let it drag you from moment to moment.  
If the world’s a meat grinder, following that metaphor to its inevitable end, you don’t believe there is a butcher.  
Butchers, plural, but not a singular force in the world save time could account for the places each chunk of every lost life ends up. Back to dust, back to the firmament, back to the shining bleak sleep between visions.  
You do not speak of the seething bacchanalia you sold your soul to, at least not often, because words are the only power invested in you. Your hands are weak, your flesh is weak, your face when it tries to smile is a shaky mask, but your voice crystallizes under your tongue, and every breath you elect to take grinds more sounds from your teeth and the thing about sound,  
the thing that keeps you speaking,  
is that it echoes.  
An echo implies finitude.  
An echo implies boundaries.  
An echo implies that when you reach out in the dark, from somewhere just beyond your field of vision, a clammy hand will reach back.  
When you address the void beyond your fragile sense of self, you must be careful, reverently in denial, because if you aren’t,  
the void may just answer.


End file.
